The Secret Wisdom of the Earth

by Christopher Scotton

  “If he owns everything, how is anybody going to stop him?”

  Pops thought for a moment. “I don’t know yet, to be honest.”

  “And if he owns the land, can’t he just do what he wants with it?”

  “Think of it this way. Just because a river runs through my property, do I have the right to pollute it for the people living downstream? Suppose they get sick and die because of my mess; should I be held to account?”

  “I guess so.”

  “I guess so too. But folks are so used to taking Bubba’s money, they’re afraid if they oppose him, he’ll shut off that big fat teat of his.”

  “That’s gross.”

  “Not half as gross as what he’s doing up there. And the only person in this town with the cojones to oppose him is Paul Pierce.”

  “That’s some talk coming from Missi County’s resident war hero.” It was Chester Skill at the bottom porch step. He eased into the wicker chair with an exhale as if he and his old bones had called a temporary truce. I got up to pour him a sour mash whiskey and delivered it on a silver tray.

  “What did you do to be a war hero, Pops?”

  “What any man would have done. I survived.”

  Chester smiled and shook his head. “Son, your grandfather single-handedly saved the lives of five men.”

  “What? Mom never told me that. Tell me the story.”

  Pops shifted in his chair and grimaced as if the thought of talking about himself had triggered back pain.

  “His bravery that day won him the Navy Cross—got nominated for the Medal of Honor—bastards wouldn’t give it to him, though.”

  I looked over at Pops, who was in the middle of an extended eye roll. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

  He took a sip of mash and watched as the ice in his glass slowly rotated with the careful movement of his wrist; then he looked over at me with a barely discernible smile. “It’s not our way.”

  Our eyes locked for a few moments more, and the porch fell into silence until Chester finally said, “Well, if you won’t tell, I will. Boy needs to understand his stock, Arthur.”

  Pops raised his glass. “Have at it, then. I seem to get braver each telling.”

  Chester put his glass on the table and squared to me. “It was toward the end of the War in the Pacific and the Japs were taking a beating…”

  “… Once the ship limped back to Pearl Harbor they sent him home and had a big ceremony in Washington, D.C., with all the brass there. Whole Peebles family drove up for it. I came in from Chicago.”

  “That was a sight.” Pops laughed. “Caravan of hillbillies roasting deer meat in the Pentagon parking lot.”

  “Your momma was proud, though,” Chester said, pointing.

  “She was indeed.” Pops raised his glass and looked into the ice at the patterns they drew on their devolution to water. “She was indeed.”

  “So, Kevin, I’m afraid I have to disagree with your grandfather’s assertion that no one in the county other than Paul Pierce has balls. Arthur Bradley Peebles is the bravest man I know.”

  Pops waved away the compliment. “Bravery is when you have time to weigh out the peril and you act anyway at great personal risk. I just acted without thinking. Now, what Paul is doing—standing up to Bubba Boyd—that’s bravery.”

  “Who’s this Paul person?”

  “You’ll meet him tomorrow after calls. I arranged for Audy Rae to take your mother for a new hairdo with Paul at Miss Janey’s salon. I imagine you could use a summer cut as well—unless you’re going for that Lord of the Flies look.”

  “So I says to Toomey, I says, ‘I’m… not… puttin… thaaaat thing in me!’ This water too hot for you? If it is, jus say so. So he looks at me an says, ‘It would be nice if we tried somethin different for a change.’ So I says, ‘Yeah, it sure would be nice if we tried somethin different, like a movie an some presents or somethin. That would certainly be different for a change.’ ”

  “So what’d it look like, then?”

  “What do think it looked like, you fool girl?”

  “What I mean is, did it look like a real one?”

  “No, it looked like a giant flesh lipstick. He said he stole it from his sister, who stole it from Bubby Allison’s momma. So I says to Toomey, I says, ‘Least you could do is get me my own one.’ I says, ‘If you get me my own one I might try it.’ An you know what?… He did!… An man, Levona, you wouldn’t believe…”

  “Levona!” Mr. Paul spurred from the storeroom at the back of the Paris Hair Salon. “I’m not paying you to gab all day with Petunia. She’s got work and so do you. Mrs. Gillooly’s ready to be shampooed; please see to it… now!”

  “Yes, Mr. Paul.” Levona slunk away and Mr. Paul went back into the storeroom, leaving me and Petunia to fill the empty spaces with conversation.

  Upside down in the trough of the sink in the washing department at Miss Janey’s Paris Hair Salon and Notion Shop, I knew for certain that Petunia Wickle was the most beautiful creature on earth. She lathered a palmful of Breathless Body shampoo into my scalp with fingers that felt like a thousand giant flesh lipsticks. I cleared my throat to let her know I was capable of continuing the conversation.

  “Would you like conditioner?”

  I nodded.

  “Okay, you got it.”

  Petunia’s ink-black hair hung straight down from the sides of her face, turning in just below her grapefruit-size breasts, which were rudely constrained in a yellow midriff top. Tight button-fly jeans and burgeoning hips budding to full promise. Between the bottom of her midriff and the top of her jeans was a sanctuary of bare flesh. Light pink, like the new skin under an old scab.

  She leaned over to the counter for conditioner and her stomach touched my cheek, sending slashes of electricity to my feet. She leaned again to put it back. The brass buttons of her jeans were dry ice against my face and made her easy skin seem torrid. The elastic band at the bottom of her yellow midriff was stretched well past the point of serviceability, which afforded me full view of the top’s contents.

  “So how you like it here in the dust pit a the universe?”

  The question startled me from my fantasy. “Fine,” I said, instantly regretting my lack of wit. She worked the conditioner into my scalp expertly. My eyes were three-quarters closed so I could watch the vast expanse of skin and breast in private. She rinsed me one last time and narrowed the water from my hair with her hands.

  “Sit up now so’s I can dry you.”

  My face met her stomach, which smelled of still-warm laundry.

  “Mr. Paul’s gonna do you an your mom special.”

  She led me to the first chair, smiled, and swished back to the washing department. I scrutinized her every step in the old mirrors that lined both sides of the room.

  Miss Janey’s Paris Hair Salon and Notion Shop was not weathering the downturn in the Medgar economy well. At its peak, the salon boasted eight cutting stations, a washing department with four new sinks, and two full-time manicurists. Miss Janey’s partner, Paul Pierce, ran the hair operation and Miss Janey spent most of her time with the beauty school they had opened in 1974. The beauty market was tough now, especially in Medgar.

  The cutting stations lined up like ghost-town soldiers at attention. Only the first three showed signs of any life. A crush of black combs in a white plastic jar. Yellowed beautician licenses framed in yellowed Scotch tape. Fossiled chrome blow dryers with frayed cloth cords and cracked oblong black plugs. Gray-patched mirrors reflecting faithfully every day since opening, but now as weak as old flashlights. Beige and brown tile, pocked with bare concrete where tiles had broken. The walls were light yellow at the ceiling, fading to a dull beige at the bottom. Years of forgotten hair clippings gathered in every corner. An orange vinyl settee in the waiting room with ten-year-old style books faded from the morning sun. The Notion Shop had closed two years ago; a dusty sheet hung in the open doorway that linked the two.

  In Petunia’s department were four
yellow porcelain sinks, two black-and-chrome reclining chairs bettered with duct tape. The eight bays hadn’t been full since senior prom morning years ago, and the staff had been whittled from twelve to just four, including Miss Janey, who came in only twice a week. Paul Pierce now performed all the colorings and perms and most of the manicures himself. Hadn’t held an elocution class in eighteen months. He whisked out from the back, blade thin and posture perfect, with soft blue eyes and a welcoming smile.

  Before she died, Paul’s mother would always thrust herself between them and their father, sweet-talking the old man down or taking the brunt when life put hard upon him. Back then, it was only open hands, or maybe a fist when he was up with shine. On nights when the blocking and the sweet-talk failed them, she would gather up the hurt, usually just Paul because he was small and slow and lacking in guile, and hold him close for hours, drawing out the pain like a madstone for poison.

  With her gone, the rage came sure as thunder, delivered from a hickory stave instead of hands. Afterward, Paul would walk up Cheek Mountain, high above the cabin, to a quiet place that looked out across the hollow toward Indian Head. He would dig out a shallow dint in the cool loam, just long enough for his ten-year-old body, strip to underwear, and lay down in the wallow, covering himself with the soothing dirt and leaves the way kids in a wholly different universe sometimes bury themselves in beach sand.

  Once he was interred, the mountain became his new madstone, extracting the hurt of beatings or the sting of schoolyard spites until he was cleansed and healed and delivered back pure. After the earth had done its work, he would sing up at the sky, in a voice that church folks said was gifted from God.

  His brothers, Jacob and Wagner, lit out on their eighteenth birthdays: Jacob for West Texas and Wagner for whatever wind. But by then, the old man was stooped and Paul was large enough to fight back. He distinctly remembered the last time his father beat him, when the seventeen-year cicadas emerged that spring, bedlamming the woods with a shrill that cloaked the cabin shouts.

  In his teen years, after the beatings stopped, he would go to the mountain hoping the cool earth would draw out the strange, disturbing desires he felt. But as the years passed, the stirrings became robust, then relentless, as he stopped trying to blunt them or even understand them; he just pushed them down inside the mantle of his soul.

  Paul joined the army at eighteen, thinking it would merit some respect from his father, but when the service deemed him unsuited for infantry, the old man just laughed. He was billeted to the administrative pool at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and soon won a spot with the newly formed U.S. Army Chorus as first tenor. The Army Band and Chorus toured the U.S. and most of Europe west of the Iron Curtain: London, Stockholm, Madrid, Brussels, and, of course, Paris.

  But the burning desires continued and the unslaking made them compound on themselves until they took him dizzy and fixated to the dark corners of parks in Paris, to right-angle alleys in Earls Court, and to the murky edges of monuments in Washington, D.C., furtive in the dark with the other nervous shadows. One night in the bushes by the Iwo Jima memorial, the police swooped and Paul pleaded to indecent exposure and a general discharge.

  In shame, he drifted down to Nashville, bunking with an Army Band buddy who had just gotten a session gig with Decca. Paul sat openmouthed in the corner of the studio watching Patsy Cline and Owen Bradley fight over the thirteenth take of “Crazy.” When the backing tenor took sick, Paul pushed himself to audition. He opened with “Wings of a Dove,” and after the first bar, the great Owen Bradley himself looked up from the soundboard with a smile broad as the twelve-track console.

  “Hello, young man, I’m Mr. Paul, how are you? Just fine? That’s nice. What sort of haircut would you like today?”

  I mumbled something and he went straight to work, scissors and syllables flashing with equal pace and precision.

  “So how are you finding Medgar so far? Good? Well, don’t you listen to what people may be telling you about this town. I’ve lived here nearly all my life and it’s a fine town. Ask your grandaddy what a fine town this is. How is he, by the way? I hear you’re helping him with the vet business now. That’s a fine thing. You know, I’ve known him since I was a boy. It seems he’s as much a part of this town as the mountains. And your granmomma Miss Sarah, now, there’s a lady who had class. I first saw her when I was thirteen and she and your grandaddy had just moved back into town. One day she walked into church, tall as timber, with this big red hat that she took off and laid on the pew next to her. Took up two places, that hat did. Lands… the way she used to go into town so pretty and straight like an ad in Look magazine. All the girls took to walking like her and wearing their hair like her, and one time when I was in Dempsey’s with Jane she came in, smiling as ever, and says to us, ‘Good morning, Master Paul, Miss Jane,’ like we were best friends, and I say, ‘Good morning, Miss Sarah,’ back to her, and then Jane says, ‘That’s a might pretty hair ribbon, Miss Sarah’—she had this bright red ribbon in her hair—and she says to Jane, ‘Oh, do you think so?’ and she takes the ribbon out and sits Jane down and ties it in her hair and gives both her shoulders a squeeze and says, ‘Miss Jane, you have such exceptional hair, will you do me the honor of wearing my ribbon?’ ”

  Mr. Paul paused with his scissors for a few seconds as if to consider the memory, then continued cutting and talking.

  “… ‘such exceptional hair,’ she told us. When she died, a bit of this town died with her. Is this part too high for you? Okay? But you know, she did get some people’s backs up. Some ladies sniffed at her, and she made a mortal enemy of a few men.”

  Mr. Paul looked toward the lobby and lowered his voice. “I tell you, I remember her ruction with some local bullyboys like it was this morning. Two of those boys were out front of Hivey’s giving a black girl the business, you know, touching her and so forth and saying rude things. I was sitting on the bench out front of Smith’s Ice Cream and this poor girl didn’t know what to do because back then black folks didn’t give sass to whites, especially young men like these. One of them grabs her and starts pulling her into their truck. And she just keeps saying, ‘Please, sir, just stop it, please, sir.’

  “I go on up and tell them to quit. But they just laughed at me and called me rude names. So I grab the girl’s arm and try to pull her back to the sidewalk. But they were too strong. We were in a tug-of-war for that girl and I was losing. Then your granmomma, she walks out of Dempsey’s, arms fulled up with parcels, and sees what’s going on, and she knew what those boys were gonna do. So she sets everything down, your granmomma does, and walks over to the one boy and slaps him across the face so hard it sounded like a rifle shot. And she says, real quiet, ‘Don’t you ever touch a woman against her will again, do you understand?’ And they were so surprised they all just stood there like a bunch of dumb stones. She took the black girl by the arm—she was shaking like sixty that black girl—and Miss Sarah calmly led her off like they were going to a party. And those boys just skunked away, but you know they never did anything like that again. Jane wore that ribbon to her funeral. She still has it.”

  Mr. Paul was silent for half a minute, reflecting on the ribbon and the rifle-shot slap. Fingers working so fast it looked like he was trimming air.

  I imagined what my grandmother must have been like: a quiet confidence that marked every gesture, a bounding laugh, the simple joy she took in even the most mundane chores. I looked over at Mom sitting in the waiting room and tried to imagine what her mother would say to her to set things right, but my mind went empty. I took a deep breath to try and crowd out the despair tightening me.

  “You know, in the years after she passed, your grandaddy was a prime catch among the single ladies in Medgar. He even caught Jane’s fancy for a time, once she became a successful businesswoman, but he wouldn’t have none of it.”

  I thought about Pops’ pain and sadness on losing my grandmother and tried to measure it against my own. But mine was shot throug
h with guilt and anger built on blame rather than lost love.

  “There aren’t many like your grandaddy,” Mr. Paul continued. “Don’t tell him I know this, but for the last four Christmases he’s been secretly delivering toys and turkeys to about forty of the poorest families. He doesn’t think anybody knows, but most of us do.” There was a moment of quiet while Mr. Paul searched for another topic. “This is a fine town, you know. Best folks in the world live here.” From outside the salon came the sound of a muffled explosion. Mr. Paul’s face darkened. He stopped cutting and closed his eyes and gathered in a deep breath. “I will not abide what they are doing up there,” he said in precisely measured syllables. His eyes shot open, anger flaring them out. “Do you know what Bubba Boyd’s done to the streams and the wells around here? Poisoned. The water from the taps up Corbin Hollow comes out gray now. Everyone up there is getting sick from it. Their slurry pond is all filled up and we think they’re pumping the slurry into one of the abandoned mines, which is totally illegal.”

  “What’s slurry?” I asked, although I knew it didn’t sound like a good thing.

  He paused and put down his scissors, folded his hands across his chest. “When they bring the coal up it’s all dirty and dusty so they have to wash it before it can go on the train. The slurry is what comes off the chunks of coal—dust, dirt, nasty chemicals, all mixed in water. If he’s pumping it into the mines, guess where it ends up?”

  “Uhhhmm, in the drinking water?”

  “That’s exactly correct.” His picked up his scissors and began cutting again, faster, purposeful, his mouth a single taut line. After a while he softened. “I’m sorry, I just get so angry at that Bubba Boyd… what he’s doing to this place.

  “Well now, let’s just see,” he said, holding up a hand mirror so I could see the clown smile of white skin at the nape of my neck. “I think you’re ready for the prom, young sir.” He dusted off the snips of hair clinging to my shirt and escorted me to one of the orange vinyl chairs in reception next to Audy Rae and Mom.